Archive by category | Finance

Death row for drug development costs estimates?

Death row for drug development costs estimates?

Last week, FDA Director of CDER, Janet Woodcock, lectured to a full house at the Mission Bay campus of the University of California – San Francisco.  She spoke on ways academic research centers could play a larger role in the development of new medical technologies.  I very much enjoyed the talk, the slides for which are available here.  Read more

Will work for cash

Will work for cash

Three years ago, at the 3rd Plant-Based Vaccines & Antibodies meeting in Verona , I proposed what I thought was a novel idea to move the field of “pharming” forward.  With Andres Wigdorovitz from Buenos Aires in Argentina, I suggested that companies in the USA and Europe could advance their recombinant plant-produced biologicals product development very significantly by investing in research groups in countries like Argentina and South Africa, where the science was essentially on par with northern countries, but personnel and facilities cost far less.  Moreover, the regulatory and ethical frameworks are often as sophisticated as those of developed countries, and according to the most recent annual report of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agribiotech Applications (ISAAA), in fact developing countries are among the leading proponents of the use of GM plants.  Read more

New Bioentrepreneur article

We’ve posted a new article on the Bioentrepreneur home page, investigating the costs of going public for small companies. You can access both the HTML and PDF versions here.  The author is Mark Kessel, who writes for Nature Biotechnology on occasion, including here (on Sarbanes-Oxley) and here (pharma’s troubled business model).  He’s also hosted one of our Bioentrepreneur “Meet the Author” discussions, which you can find here.  Read more

How VCs build companies today

We published in the December issue of Nature Biotechnology a news analysis detailing some of the funding models being used by today’s life science investors. Some are looking to expand syndicates, ensuring that funding is there for follow-on rounds. One is sometimes providing huge A rounds by itself. And though many favor an “asset-based” approach, the R&D platform engine is not as dead as might be thought.  Read more

Assessing VC funding in biotech

Ever since Prospect Ventures “handed back $150M “:https://www.fis.dowjones.com/WebBlogs.aspx?aid=DJFVW00020111006e7a60005l&ProductIDFromApplication=&r=wsjblog&s=djfvwof of committed money to its limited partners, there has been plenty written on the lack of venture capital funding for the life sciences.  Read more

Blue Sky funding

Blue Sky funding

I read "an article in The Scientist ":https://the-scientist.com/2011/10/17/nih-grants-funding-drops/ on funding with a little cynical laugh the other day. It described how “The success rate of the government agency’s grant applications has hit an all-time low” – of 17.4% of all applications. That’s just under one in five: consider, then, that a recent call by South Africa’s National Research Foundation for 40 prestigious Research Chairs in local universities was over-subscribed by at least 10 to 1 – and that was with pre-screening by the institutions. Another call for “blue sky” projects for rated researchers – open to all 2,300-odd such people  … Read more

The Moneyball VCs

The Moneyball VCs

What makes a great venture capitalist? Conventional wisdom says it’s the experience, expertise, Rolodex, and the visionary eye for spotting the Next Big Thing. But what if this were wrong? What if the important variables in the statistical game of hitting one or two “grand slams” in a VC portfolio, which then make up for the dead or dying companies, could be identified and replicated? Why can’t there be a Moneyball moment for the VC industry? Enter Correlation Ventures and Ulu Ventures, two new firms with heavy emphases on ‘quant’ approaches. Launched in stealth mode in 2010 with limited partners  … Read more